Designing Positive User Experiences

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Consumer expectations are at an all-time high, and it’s a challenge to not only keep up, but to stay ahead. One of the most reliable ways to earn a customer’s loyalty is by delivering a positive user experience (UX). Users are looking for brands to improve their lives and don’t have time to waste on a product or service that doesn’t meet expectations.

Did you know every object, experience or process with which humans interact falls under the user experience design umbrella? And it’s the user experience (UX) designers’ job to determine how people interact with those objects, experiences or processes.

It’s easy to think about UX as a solely digital experience, but that couldn’t be further from the truth—UX is integrated into every aspect of our lives. I promise it’ll drive you crazy when you realize all the bad examples of UX that are out there (I’m looking at you, DC Metro!) On the flip side, companies like Disney and Uber are getting it right by creating a beginning-to-end, customer-centric experience.
Here are five key components to creating a positive UX for a product, event or website/app:

Discovery and Research: Whatever you do, don’t skip this step! It’s when the design team learns everything about the project and creates a solid strategy that carries through from start to finish.Tools used: Competitor research and user interviews

Synthesizing Research and Design Strategy: Draw insights from the data you collected by getting it all out in a way that makes it easy to be moved and manipulated by your team.Tools used: affinity mapping

Placement and Design: Put your ideas in front of users. You want to get their feedback, make adjustments to your designs, and repeat.Tools used: paper prototyping and wireframing

Execution: Create and share high-fidelity designs with key stakeholders, allowing them to visualize each static screen as close to the final look as possible.Tools used: There’s an abundance of online prototyping tools, but currently leading the pack are InVision and Adobe Experience Design.